Some Complain of Class Divide In Chinese-Americans' Charity

By NINA BERNSTEIN

Published: January 20, 2007

CORRECTION APPENDED

As a schoolteacher in New York's Chinatown in the 1960s, when the government's war on poverty seemed focused on blacks and Latinos, Virginia Kee noticed that many of her Asian pupils were too poor to pay $2 for a class trip. To connect community needs with public money, Ms. Kee helped found what is now the Chinese-American Planning Council, one of the largest social service agencies for Asians in the country.

These days, in an era of shrunken public dollars and booming philanthropy, as universities and museums showcase multimillion-dollar gifts by Chinese-Americans, Ms. Kee worries about a different kind of disconnect: a divide between the explosive growth of Chinese-American wealth and the unmet needs of a new generation of Chinese immigrants who have streamed to the city since the 1990s.

In the society pages, out of reach, Ms. Kee said, she sees figures of Chinese-American success at benefits that raise half a million dollars for the Frick Collection or $3 million for breast cancer research.

''We're out of their orbit,'' Ms. Kee observed wistfully. ''We get donations from poor people that we've helped. We don't get donations from the rich, who should be helping the poor.''

No comprehensive numbers exist to track charity by ethnic groups, let alone donors of Chinese heritage. Many people of all ethnicities keep their donations private.

But concerns about an uptown-downtown split are widely echoed by Asian-American groups serving the working poor in the sprawling Chinatowns of Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan; by scholars of philanthropy; and by Asian donors who have bucked the tide.

Those concerns have grown along with the influx of immigrants from China, up 53 percent in New York in the 1990s alone; today, among foreign-born New Yorkers, the Chinese outnumber every nationality but Dominicans.

Of course, many other immigrant groups have shown similar patterns of giving. The first generation typically sends money back to needy relatives and hometowns, while later strivers mark their success with gifts to mainstream institutions patronized by America's patricians, or give to art and education to enhance wider appreciation of their cultural heritage. Even Jewish philanthropy, now often admired as a model of ethnic solidarity, was long divided by resentment between wealthy German Jews and penniless Jewish newcomers from Eastern Europe.

But the Chinese diaspora in America has been even more fragmented by language, lineage, class and political history. In 1949, when the founding of Israel served as a unifying event for many Jews, the rise of Communist China further polarized the Chinese in America, noted Henry Tang, 65, a founder of the Committee of 100, an organization of prominent Americans of Chinese ancestry.

For people in his generation, Mr. Tang said, loyalties and outlook differ radically depending on where and when they trace their Chinese roots. There is little commonality between, say, the children of the wealthy elite who left Shanghai before World War II and the descendants of Cantonese peasants who migrated to the United States in the 19th century and were ghettoized by anti-Chinese laws. The differences can be even sharper, he said, for those raised in Hong Kong, Taiwan or a rural province of mainland China.

''When you say, 'Donate money to help the Chinese,' '' Mr. Tang explained, ''they're conflicted that their monies will not be helping people of their own. Like, some people will say, 'I grew up in Taiwan, and you're asking me to help these people from Fujian' '' -- the coastal province that has generated the latest wave of immigrants, both legal and illegal.

''Others will say, 'I'm a Hong Kong person, and your mission here is to serve people from everywhere else.' Or you may get an A.B.C. -- American-born Chinese -- saying, 'Well, I really want to help the people in downtown San Francisco.' ''

As immigration soared after the 1965 overhaul of immigration laws and Asians reached 5 percent of the American population, the picture was further complicated by a pan-Asian structure of giving fostered by the United Way. Umbrella organizations like the Asian American Federation lump together groups that have warred with each other in recent history -- Koreans, Japanese, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, as well as the Chinese, who officially reached 2.5 million in 2000, with 374,000 in New York City.

''When you represent all Asian ethnic groups, you don't represent any Asian ethnic groups,'' said Wayne Ho, director of the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families. ''It's really hard to get individual donations.''

A working paper on Asian-American philanthropy produced at Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute in 2004 cited anecdotal evidence that ''many Chinese-Americans do not give at all, and those that do, give to their university, or to their church, but not to ethnic causes.'' The author, Andrew Ho, who recently earned an M.B.A. along with a master's in public policy, added in an interview that especially among the well-off in their 30s and 40s, ''those ties that bind us all as Chinese are not there,'' making suburban fund-raising difficult for organizations trying to help new immigrants.

Correction: January 27, 2007, Saturday
A front-page article last Saturday about complaints by some nonprofit groups of a class divide in philanthropy among Chinese-Americans misstated the given name of the executive director of the Ong Family Foundation, which makes annual grants to such groups, including the Chinese-American Planning Council, a social service agency. The executive director is Nelson Louis, not Norman. The article also misstated the association that Mr. Louis and Danny Ong Yee, the foundation's founding trustee, once had with the council. They are former staff members; they did not attend the council's child-care programs as children.